In 1931, a Belgian pulp-fiction writer living in Paris and churning out four titles a month using various noms de plume decided to publish a series of detective stories under his own name. His publisher had to ask him what his real name was;everyone in Paris knew him as ‘Sim’. Georges Simenon, as he identified himself, proved to have a flair for publicity: he had already made a small fortune from his pulp fiction and he could afford to launch the new series with an all-night party in a club in Montparnasse. The vulgarity of this gesture was mocked in Le Canard enchainé but the party — attended by gossip columnists, senior police officers, professional strippers, hundreds of gatecrashers and le tout Paris — was a riot and the detective stories, about a fictional police inspector named Jules Maigret, were an immediate success.

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